Seems like an apples and oranges comparison. It would make more sense to compare the number of EV chargers to the number of gas station pumps. Even then, it's not a direct comparison because EV chargers require considerably more time to deliver their energy than a gas pump does.
I've had an EV for nearly 5 years and have used public chargers fewer than 20 times. Most of those were quick 15-20 minute top-ups while taking a piss and getting some food.
It might be different for Americans but, as a Brit, it's rare that I drive over 250 miles before I'm back at home
Honestly, most people would be fine to road trip in an EV. My husband and I have gone back and forth from Colorado to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving the past two years in ours (including during some frigid weather), and it's been a fine trip.
We also went to Yellowstone last fall and not only were we fine charging in the park (we stayed at Old Faithful), but we were able to skip a charging stop on the way there (in DuBois, WY).
We just got back a week ago from driving deep into the southern hill country of Texas for the eclipse, and once again, we were fine on charging.
We've yet to find a road trip that we want to do that we haven't been able to in our Ioniq 5.
Yup, also have had zero issue road tripping in an EV.
People tend to miss a big fact when touting the "I'D HAVE TO CHARGE AWAY FROM HOME TOO MUCH!" train of thought. If you truly are driving so much that you have to charge away from home several times a month, you'd probably be able to save enough money on fuel to pay for a significant portion of the new car even ignoring maintenance/repair savings.
Outside of road trips, we've used fast chargers a total of 5 times in two years, now. Two of those were because a friend was visiting, and we were driving up to Rocky Mountain National Park several days in a row, so we stopped at the free fast chargers at the visitor center in Estes Park. (We still only have a level 1 charger at home, which is honestly fine 99+% of the time.)
Another two were when we were moving and ferrying things back and forth across town all day.
And the other was when we first got the car, and we were being overly cautious about a longer errand we had the next day.
Other than that, we have zero trouble charging at home on our 1.4 kW charger. We'll eventually put in a level 2 charger, but we see no hurry; there are other priorities right now.
This is awesome for me to hear. I’ve put on a whopping 200 miles in 5 weeks, but do drive to Montana a couple times a year. That has had me freaked out a bit about going EV. My work even has fast chargers, so one of the days I go into the office I could charge and probably be good for a month.
I really want an EV6…
I would check on the charging speeds versus battery size, because I know the Ford Lightning doesn't have a great charge speed, especially relative to battery size. (It's almost double the size of our battery and a little more than half of our typical max charging speed.) We've seen enough on the road, and they often take a long time to charge. Though I think some of them, that's because they aren't using the preconditioning feature.
Our car has a 77.4 kWh battery, and has a max charge speed of 700kW (though precious few chargers support that). Typically we'll see 230-240 kW on a fast charger when we first plug in (the charging curve slopes downward as the battery charge level rises).
It looks like the Mach E maxes out at 150 kW, which is significantly slower, and will make for a longer charge time than we see. It seems that it does at least have preconditioning (added in an update at some point), which means that if you take advantage of that feature to warm the battery up to an optimal charging temperature (~70°F), you get the max charge speed right out the gate.
I wouldn't buy any EV without battery preconditioning, and I would make absolutely certain I have it enabled for long trips. (Some cars require that you use the built-in navigation to activate preconditioning. Some just have a button.)
Before we got the preconditioning update in our Ioniq 5, we saw *significantly* longer charge times in cold weather than we do now.
I've not seen the preconditioning kick in over about 55-60°F, but if you even see temperatures below 50°, it might be worth enabling. We forgot on one of our stops on the last big trip, and we were only getting like 130kW instead of 230kW when we first plugged in. Added a few minutes to the charge. I think it was something like 48° out.
But, yeah, the times it ***really*** matters are when it's below freezing. On the one trip we took before getting the update on our car to enable it, we'd see ~30kW on plug-in, and that slowly ramped up as the battery heated up. That was when it was something like 12°F out, so *really* cold. Though the car does keep the battery at a minimum operating temperature when you're driving.
It really depends on where you live and where your route takes you. There are most definitely areas with no chargers available, and it has prevented me from taking my EV on many trips over the years.
Basically anywhere north of me has very limited DCFC choices unless you go on very specific routes towards major cities.
It definitely does depend, but we end up in some fairly rural areas, and none of our routes have prevented us doing what we wanted to do (or really caused us any significant inconvenience). We do always check ahead, but there's not been anywhere we wanted to go that we couldn't. Not yet, at least. And the charging situation is only getting better.
If we really needed to, our purchase actually included free ICE car rentals from Hyundai should we need them, and I think we're still in that period, but even with all the outdoorsy stuff we do, we've not needed to take them up on it.
I'm certain there are people for whom they wouldn't be a good option yet, but I think a lot more people would be perfectly happy with them than think they would.
Great how often do you do that? The point is most journeys are short.
The USA averages 37 miles a day and the UK 20. A 200+ mile range covers the vast majority of journeys from home.
I do it once a month. Trying living in a rural area and needing things. The place only has to be half the distance because you know, you gotta get home.
I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that there's more than one fast charger along your route.
We regularly road trip in our EV, an Ioniq 5, and while there are some areas where it is sparse, we've had no trouble planning routes and finding charging, including our trip to Yellowstone this past fall, our trip down into rural southern Texas for the eclipse last week, and regular road trips from near Denver, Colorado to rural Pennsylvania.
We generally stop every 2-3 hours to charge, about the time we'd want to get out to stretch our legs and get a bathroom break anyway. And at least half the time, by the time we're done doing our business, the car is done charging. Most of our charging stops are just 10-15 minutes.
People have used EVs in rural areas for many years. AGAIN batteries are improving along with the distance you can go between charges. Biden's infrastructure bill is funding an initiative to have charging stations no more than 50 miles apart. Between faster charge times and increased capacity for batteries this is just simply not an issue.
If you have a home that’s reasonable.
Some of our largest cities don’t have garaged parking, which makes EV adoption more problematic for those areas (though you could easily argue that most them really done need a car except when they leave the city).
Yes, an EV only really makes sense if you can charge at home, at least with current technology. One in three homes here have no driveway so that rules out a lot of people
People insist you need to charge at home but forget that you often spend a significant amount of time elsewhere. All those places can easily have chargers. Grocery shopping? Walmart is installing chargers in their parking lots. Eating out with friends? The shopping center garage is installing chargers. Getting lost in IKEA? Chargers in the parking lot. Instead of taking a few minutes out of your way to stop and refuel, you just do your normal thing and plug in while you’re doing it.
My job has a dozen chargers in the lot and I live in a highly EV adapted city and the issue with your theory is most of the time that parking is full. People aren't coming out halfway through their IKEA run or their workday to move their now fully-charged car. I live in an apartment building with like 40 teslas and *one* charging station (and no normal outlets to charge off of). My next car is going to be a PHEV just because I don't want to wait an hour when the only charging station on my route has a 3 car line or I can't snag a charging spot at IKEA or work. A lot of the EV drivers at work I've talked to share the same sentiment.
The more I talk to regular people out and about regarding my electric car, the more I'm coming to realize that a lot of Americans believe that you can't charge an EV at home without installing some major hardware.
The most common question that I have gotten from neighbors is "well how do you plan to charge it?"
There's weird amounts of pushback when I explain that I literally just plug my EV into the wall. The idea of topping my EV off overnight seems to sit with even less people than that.
It's like there's a set belief that the only possible way to refuel any type of vehicle is to physically go somewhere outside your home and use some other machine.
I don't have an EV myself, but my friend who has one only charges at home because each public charger requires a different fucking account/app you have to sign up for.
The ones here are mostly card/contactless. Tesla superchargers are obviously the easiest to use but I've just checked the app and I've only used them four times in 4.5 years.
I really doubt that’s the sole reason he doesn’t use public chargers. It’s probably more because he doesn’t need to because he’s not driving 250 miles at a time.
Though yes, it’s annoying to need an app for every different charger operator.
We're Americans, and ***outside of long road trips***, we've only used fast chargers a handful of times. Twice when a friend was visiting and we were driving up into Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) each day (we still just have a level 1 charger — 120V at 12A, or 1.4kW — at home). Twice while we were moving and driving back and forth across town all day. And I think just one other time when we were just staying local (and that one we were being overly cautious).
Other than that, even with the really slow charger at home, we've been fine. And that's including regular hiking trips up into RMNP. Our most common destination is about a 100 mile round trip with an elevation gain of around a mile. If we do that on a Saturday, we're back to our full charge by Monday morning.
We've also driven the 3000 miles (round trip) from Colorado to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving the past two years. Plenty of public charging in there, but most stops at fast chargers are only 10-15 minutes.
We just got home a week ago from a 1900 mile round trip down to extremely rural south Texas to see the eclipse.
We also took it up to Yellowstone National Park last fall in October, and we did fine charging even in the park (most areas with visitor accommodations have a couple L2 chargers). We even skipped charging one day, because the low speed limits in national parks are super easy on the battery.
In short: people are way too anxious about charging.
A lot of people seem to just not be able to wrap their head around charging at home, topping off overnight, etc.
Ev charging has to literally be identical to refilling a car with gas and their brain will not accept anything else.
The other thing is chargers can be more easily added to any given place than gas pumps, and it can be used as a draw to get business. Plus they don't need an attendant.
Strip malls, restaurants, etc can have chargers that people can use while they'd otherwise just be parked. Plus in remote areas it's a lot easier run power to a charger than to build an entire gas station.
Not saying it's the perfect solution but I feel like it's one of those things where it will manifest itself in ways we haven't even considered yet because it's a totally different paradigm than gasoline infrastructure.
EVs only get maybe half the range that a gas powered vehicle get per tank so it's still an even comparison. If an EV could get 500 miles per charge like it's gas counterpart then you'd have a fair argument. An EV will still need to stop and fill up halfway through a 500 mile trip after filling up at home while a gas powered vehicle can do the entire trip in one shot then spend 5 minute filling up with gas to make the trip back home.
As EVs grow in popularity, I see this as one of the big unspoken benefits and I wouldn't be shocked to see a significant drop in road deaths as a result.
I would be interested to see the density of charging stations per region. You may be able to get away with all electric in densely populated areas, but probably not most rural areas.
https://www.plugshare.com/
The site relies on EV drivers to keep it updated.
The DOE also keeps a map that should be up to date.
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC
Our Kia EV6 shows where upcoming chargers are along the route and even how many are available vs. in use. My wife drives it six hours every couple of months to see her dad and has never had charging issues. It's ghostly quiet and sports car quick. In sport mode, it's fast enough to outrun my old corvette (in a straight line).
Edit - We live in the countryside, have solar panels, and installed a level-2 charger in our garage. Other than long road trips, we rarely use the fast chargers. As in cell phones, car batteries apparently last longer if you don't charge to 100 percent every time. From her cell phone, my wife tells the car to charge to 80 percent when at home and 100 percent when on the road (to maximize her range). The car also sends a message announcing when it's charged.
This ignores that EV owners usually charge at home. In 8000 miles on my current car, I've charged at a charger 3 times, for about 15 minutes each time. Compared to my ICE vehicle that needed gas every 300 miles.
> This ignores that EV owners usually charge at home. In 8000 miles on my current car, I've charged at a charger 3 times, for about 15 minutes each time. Compared to my ICE vehicle that needed gas every 300 miles.
As a home owner, that describes me, but if we truly want to encourage EV adoption then we can't forget that at least 45 million US residents are renters, and they don't have nearly as good of access to overnight home charging.
https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/quick-facts-figures/quick-facts-resident-demographics/
And even if we CURRENTLY have access to charging at home, there is no guarantee that we won't be priced out come next lease and need to move somewhere without it...
Except most ev owners don't use fast ev chargers often. I drove almost 100,000 miles on my ev without using a fast charger. And I used public chargers less than 10 times m
I can pump gas in like 4 minutes. The fast chargers are quite fast for what they are, but the rotation of gas vehicles in and out of the pumps is much faster.
read the article, not even sure what this means. what is "one charging station"? is that one cord? so a gas station with 36 pumps is one gas station and one parking lot with space for 36 EVs to charge at once is 36 charging station? do the chargers that people install in their own homes count? i mean sure those are good but they only benefit the owners.
Yeah, they’re comparing one gas station to one fast charger station. DOE defines a charging station as a site with one or more EV charging ports, with “ports” being the individual charging point that connects to one car.
They also have a statistic on total “ports” available, which probably gives a better idea of possible capacity.
Also, they’re not including chargers in private homes. I don’t think there are very many level 3 residential chargers anyway, lol. You’d need some serious infrastructure investment for anything beyond level 2 in a house.
>Also, they’re not including chargers in private homes. I don’t think there are very many level 3 residential chargers anyway, lol. You’d need some serious infrastructure investment for anything beyond level 2 in a house.
In all fairness, level 1 is plenty for most people at home, if just a bit more inconvenient. Level 2 is a big QoL improvement especially if you have an abnormally long commute or more than 1 electric vehicle. Level 3 at home is an insane amount of juice to run through an house and entirely unnecessary so I would never expect anybody to have that.
But yeah I get that wasn't your point. They definitely aren't counting the home charging at all.
The average commute distance is 42 miles a day.
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us-map
Better hope you don't have any errands to run or anything that comes up.
And there’s a whole crew of people/accounts on r/electricvehicles who will tell you you’re a oil/gas/tesla shill for suggesting Electrify America has some problems.
I haven’t done an EA road trip in about 1.5 years and have no desire to punish myself any further. Tens of thousands of miles was enough.
If you can charge at home or at the office, you are in great shape for “around town” driving.
I recently got an EV when renting a car out of state. And thought it would be straightforward to find a charger somewhere near a restaurant to charge while I’m eating, or maybe somewhere close to the hotel and just leave it overnight to charge.
It wasn’t that easy.
Virtually all of the chargers I found were level 2 - 6-8kW. Once I downloaded the app and created an account, I found they were priced by the hour, with it being just a few bucks an hour for the first 2-4 hours and then jumping to $15-$20 an hour beyond that. My car (Hyundai Ionic5) was telling me a full charge would take 8.5 hours! Meals didn’t give me enough time to charge and overnight was going to be to be way too expensive!!!
After a few stressed out days with quite a bit of driving, I was grabbing a charge when I could (had to set up 3 different charging accounts, sigh), I was really angry and frustrated at this seemingly impossible situation.
I finally found a level 3 charger that charged at 134kW, but it took a ton of searching to do so. That unit charged my car from 50% to full in under a half hour! The annoying thing is that once charged, you start getting billed by the minute and that wasn’t clearly explained when I plugged in, so I had to run back to the car when I got the text that charging was complete. There simply aren’t enough level 3 chargers around in order to make this easy!
All and all, I found the experience very annoying with hit or miss charging capabilities over a large metropolitan area. If I had home or office that I could simply charge at conveniently, it would be fine, but if you don’t have that - or are traveling - an EV seems like a huge hassle!!! Chargers in public aren’t enough - there need to be level 3 chargers everywhere.
If I had a gas station, I would add EV charging. Makes sense. You can sell the customers snacks and the like while they wait. Besides, most gas stations make their money from the snacks anyways.
My experience with Tesla chargers is amazing.
My experience with non-Tesla chargers is AWFUL. They are always broken? Whoever makes these chargers doesn't want people to actually use them.
A ton of them were the result of the Volkswagen dieselgate settlement. I think it's Electrify America that's essentially installed by them, but no firm commitment to keep them running.
EA was formed as part of the punishment the feds handed down to VW over diesel gate.
Think about it. Why would EA be any good if VW is forced to do it?
They honestly should create an incentive for gas companies building new gas station to include a couple of charging stations on the property. Idk it makes more sense if we truly want to transition to alternate fuels for transportation: gas, electricity, hydrogen, etc.
Nah, the companies building chargers should be sit-down restaurants and coffee shops. Give people a place to go while it's charging. I've noticed people going inside restaurants and coffee shops during charging, but they tend to sit in the vehicle at shopping centers and stores.
IHOP and Denny's would make a killing, especially being open 24/7.
The problem with fast chargers at a sit-down restaurant is a GOOD fast charger only takes 15-20 minutes to top up the car so it's ready to continue a road trip, and maybe 35-40 minutes to get to 90% or better, so it's tough to get in, get a table, order, get your food, eat, pay and get back to your car before it's finished. It'd be perfect for a slower (and presumably cheaper to deploy) 20-30 position 40-50kw DC charger that would be expected to take a full hour or more for a charge plus 8-10 positions of the full power 250-350kw ones for people in a hurry. I think Tesla was on to something with their older, slow (45kw?) 'urban' chargers where you'd expect to park, plug in and go shopping for an hour or more.
I've actually charged for 20 minutes then moved the car and gone to eat afterward so I don’t have to worry about moving it just as the waiter delivers my food.
A coffee shop would be perfect though - enough time to get in, decrypt the menu of 500 permutations of inscrutably named caffeinated refreshments and select a 1200 calorie muffin, maybe sit down to get a start enjoying them and take them with you when the car is ready.
To be fair, I'm way more likely to spend at least 20 minutes at a restaurant than a gas station.
Besides, the charger is actually in the EV, the station is just a fancy plug that talks to the battery pack.
And if the stations are put next to restaurants, it's fair that the people using them are also paying customers, so it's less important that people be constantly moving their cars around to make room.
That might help until charging gets faster, but the really competition is when 10-80% charging times are down to 10 mins or less. Then you'll want gas station type charging stations and see much higher EV adaption.
Physics prevents charging that quickly. We can't deliver enough power to the charger, nor can that much power be passed to the vehicle by a reasonably sized cable. EVs will always have relatively long charging times.
The 250kW cable is thinner than the 150kW cable. The tech has kept up. There are even higher voltage charging stations out there capable of moving enough electrons for a 0-100% charge in 10-15 minutes, but batteries haven't reached a point where they can do that just yet.
There's no way to get enough current to the chargers to meet theoretical demand. You guys are looking at the wrong side of the charging infrastructure.
more EVs = higher demand = more necessary current = slower charging times
There's no way to overcome this problem currently. However fast you can theoretically charge cars is irrelevant if there's no power to charge the cars.
After one trucking company showed a requirement for a dedicated power station to charge 13 short haul trucks on a daily basis, people should understand the ridiculousness of EVs and their insane demands going forward. We're a long, long way off from an EV in every garage.
Other countries have managed to do it. Surely the US isn't that far behind the curve. It isn't a matter of a shortage of power, but distributing it at the right time and place. Time of Use pricing has solved that in many places, since EV drivers can schedule the car to charge in the middle of the night when there's surplus power.
Yeah that's not true at all lol. We're already getting charging times down into the teens and cables are getting more efficient in general. Battery composition and charging structures have already improved dramatically in the last 15 years, and will continue to do so as we discover new manufacturing methods.
That’s what happens in Germany. Some even provide free charging to get the clients to buy something else there. But I think they should upgrade their interior first.
For my Lightning with a 130 kW-h battery, charging it 0-100% at home would be $13 for 320 miles per the EPA.
DC fast charging it varies by state. Here in Wisconsin Electrify America is priced per minute (for now), so the same battery would be roughly $20.
Other states DC fast chargers are priced per kW-h, averaging around 48 cents. The same "tank" would cost me $62. It is more expensive than the gasoline equivalent F150 because at 20 mpg, 320 miles would be $56 (assuming $3.50 a gallon).
The savings come from charging at home for day-to-day use.
Once did some work for an oil company… the important concept is “throughput,” or the number of vehicles you can fill up in one hour. Gas stations not only have this heavy numerical advantage in sheer number of facilities but also much higher throughput per facility, given how slowly an EV charges.
For EACH reason, EVs are disadvantaged. Then when you fscor both data points into account, the EV market has a very long way to go…
This is changing though. With an EV, anywhere with electricity is a potential gas station. Gassing up is always a discrete step in a trip but charging an EV can be a step combined with the destination or purpose. Many parking garages are adding chargers so you can charge while you work or shop. If you’re going on a long trip, you can stop, stretch your legs, grab a bite to eat, all while your car is charging, then hit the road more refreshed.
The difference is you don't fill your car with gas at home, work, while shopping, or the myriad of other places chargers can be placed that gas cannot.
The EV charging network is also not complete. This is only a step in the direction towards a final goal of ubiquitous charging.
Was about to mention this. Drove from LA to Vegas back in November, and out of all the *working* DC fast chargers, none of them along the way exceeded 20 kwh - DC fast should be able to reach 50 kwh.
and 4 out of 10 of those fast charge stations is broken. I see people that dont even own an EV are downvoting. Electrify America has a huge amount of fast charge stations that just do not work or charge at a trickle charge rate. It's a known fact pull your heads out of the sand and demand federal regulations that force them to repair them.
Last year, researchers visited every public fast charger in the San Francisco Bay Area and found that almost 23 percent of them had “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors.” And in a survey of EV drivers, the auto consultancy J.D. Power found the public charging network “plagued with non-functioning stations.” One in five sessions failed to deliver a charge. Almost three-quarters of those failures involved a station that malfunctioned or was offline. and it gets worse when you get out away from big cities. The midwest has a huge number of dead or broken chargers.
One can fill a car with a tank of gas in 5 minutes or less.
Let's say that all the public EV chargers were DC Fast chargers and people only charged to 200 mile range. That's 15 minutes of time minimum. We'd need 3 times the number or EV charging stations than gas pumps. Once there are 3 EV stations for every 1 pump or they can figure out how to fast charge to 200 miles an EV in under 5 minutes to get to 1:1, we have a long way to go.
I can charge my EV at my house with far less than 5 minutes of effort.
You don't have to match gas stations in throughput. Most EV charging is done at home. Effectively *zero* gas pumping is done at home.
Now, go on ten 50 mile trips without stopping at a gas station. Congrats - you learned that different technologies have different uses.
Also for what it's worth, a 500 mile trip in my EV will take exactly one charging stop. In my gas car (that's right, I own both) it would also take one stop. It would be ~5 minutes for a gas fill up, and it's ~20 minutes for the EV charge. That's a 15 minute difference in a 8-9 hour trip. It's also about half the price.
Are you sure that proved the point you were hoping to make?
Ok? But obviously at any given time it’s a small percentage of EV owners doing that. This is about how many chargers would be needed to replace gas stations
Not 3x, more like 10x to 20x.
Gas pumps can deliver 10 gal/min, which for an average efficiency of 25mpg, is equivalent to delivering 250 miles of range per minute. Even a 250kW Tesla fast charger will only deliver 17 miles per minute maximum. That's 15 times slower! and you can't even sustain it for the whole capacity of the battery, it slows down significantly after reach ~50% SoC.
Even taking in account the time spent opening the gas tank and ideal EV charging conditions, you still need at least 10 EV fast charges to be equivalent to a single gas pump!
That’s only if you treat pumping gas and recharging as equivalent activities. Generally, you stand next to your car for a couple of minutes while it refills and then you go on your way. However, in increasingly more places, you plug your car in when you get there and then walk away and go about your business.
I was giving best case scenario of all charging stations being able to provide the fastest DC charging method which can give 200 miles range in 5 minutes. Using today's numbers, however, it would require like what you said, 10x to 20x.
There might be one EV "station" for every 15 gas stations, but there's no way that there is 1 EV charger for every 15 gas pumps.
I can tell you right now within a 5 mi radius of my house, there's 3 EV chargers *total* and there's easily a dozen gas stations in that same radius, and the smallest one has 8 pumps.
Ah yes, tell that to the 30% of Americans who rent...
Have yet to see an apartment complex with charging stations at it. Would love to see it though. If it became standard to have charging stations in complexes, and they were reasonably priced (along with idle fees to keep them available) I'd more strongly consider an EV.
At the moment, public charging is not only a hassle, but not even cheaper than gas...
It's all about WHERE you live though. I can tell you within a 5 mi from MY house there's 20 tesla superchargers and 11 slow chargers all in different stations.
If the average gas station has 8 pumps and a pump on average is occupied twice as long as a charging station...
The usa has 1 fast EV station for every 15 gas stations
but 1/200 the equivalent refueling capacity
What makes this trickier is the fact that home charging is more common (as opposed to you know filling up the tank at your house?!) and that the gas vs electric car market is still very saturated with gas
I live in a suburb in CA. The places I can charge are pretty much unlimited. There’s some even at our local parks and fast food places. One of the “smarter” places to start buildings these would be at the movie theaters, go in and watch a movie and charge your car at the same time.
I’ve found two Community Centers with free fast charging. It works as an incentive for me to workout a little longer so the car can be fully charged on someone else’s dime.
How many are available for all the people who park on streets? Not everyone is going to have a garage. Until we can address the needs of street parkers, I don't see EV being viable. No one wants to sit in a parking lot for half an hour at least once a week. For those with a significant commute, they definitely don't want to do that every day.
When EVs can recharge in under ten minutes and have the same drive range as an ICE under all weather conditions and have features like AWD I'll consider one. Until then I like my Subaru.
Luckily the AWD part is already here. But, I feel you on the rest. The charging can be a hassle, but I find that by the time I use the restroom and stretch my legs it's usually close to done charging.
The weather thing is a huge sticking point. In cold weather range does drop drastically. The hardcore fans will tell you "that happens in ICE cars too", but the reality is that it's much more impactful in an EV.
All that said though they are super fun vehicles and road trips are definitely possible with a little extra planning.
A fast EV charging station might take an hour to service a single EV.
A gas STATION can service many more. Let's pretend there are 8 pumps per station, and each pump can service a car in 5 minutes. That would be 40 cars per hour.
So that is a capacity of 1 EV service per 600 GV (gas vehicle) service. Roughly.
Also, fast charging is terrible for batteries, and reduces the lifespan significantly.
Still not buying one. If it was just a rechargeable engine, fine, but I’m not interested in having a car with an operating system that belongs to someone else.
I want the stuff I buy to be mine, and I’m not switching to this.
So one EV charging station can do one car around 150 miles an hour (if lucky) but one gas station may have 8-10 pumps that can put 8-20 gallons (100 miles or more) per minute.
.... And each station has 8 pumps on average that can all fill a tank within 5 minutes at most even for huge vehicles.. While charging stations take up to 8 hours...
If we're being really generous to EV and say it takes 4 hours to charge and 5 minutes to fill a car tank, if you do the math here one gas pump nearly 50x more efficient than a charging station for fueling cars.. Just one pump too.
Not that I like it but this is a silly comparison lol
Seems like an apples and oranges comparison. It would make more sense to compare the number of EV chargers to the number of gas station pumps. Even then, it's not a direct comparison because EV chargers require considerably more time to deliver their energy than a gas pump does.
On the other hand, you have more people with chargers at home than gas pumps. It really is tricky, agreed.
I thought everyone had gas pumps in their home.
Only on 3 bean chilly night
what happens on 3 bean warm nights?
We do not speak of such nights
You pushed too hard
The Rancho Gordon subscription pays for itself!
Why does Irish bean soup only have 239 beans in it?
Sir, that’s not a gas pump, it’s a leaky refinery.
Everyone does, but then they also have more chargers than pumps. It’s crazy out there. Like living in an octopus.
Not after my friends died in a freak gasoline fighting accident.
In Texas they do.
I've had an EV for nearly 5 years and have used public chargers fewer than 20 times. Most of those were quick 15-20 minute top-ups while taking a piss and getting some food. It might be different for Americans but, as a Brit, it's rare that I drive over 250 miles before I'm back at home
I could drive for 250 miles and not leave my state
[удалено]
Honestly, most people would be fine to road trip in an EV. My husband and I have gone back and forth from Colorado to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving the past two years in ours (including during some frigid weather), and it's been a fine trip. We also went to Yellowstone last fall and not only were we fine charging in the park (we stayed at Old Faithful), but we were able to skip a charging stop on the way there (in DuBois, WY). We just got back a week ago from driving deep into the southern hill country of Texas for the eclipse, and once again, we were fine on charging. We've yet to find a road trip that we want to do that we haven't been able to in our Ioniq 5.
Yup, also have had zero issue road tripping in an EV. People tend to miss a big fact when touting the "I'D HAVE TO CHARGE AWAY FROM HOME TOO MUCH!" train of thought. If you truly are driving so much that you have to charge away from home several times a month, you'd probably be able to save enough money on fuel to pay for a significant portion of the new car even ignoring maintenance/repair savings.
Outside of road trips, we've used fast chargers a total of 5 times in two years, now. Two of those were because a friend was visiting, and we were driving up to Rocky Mountain National Park several days in a row, so we stopped at the free fast chargers at the visitor center in Estes Park. (We still only have a level 1 charger at home, which is honestly fine 99+% of the time.) Another two were when we were moving and ferrying things back and forth across town all day. And the other was when we first got the car, and we were being overly cautious about a longer errand we had the next day. Other than that, we have zero trouble charging at home on our 1.4 kW charger. We'll eventually put in a level 2 charger, but we see no hurry; there are other priorities right now.
This is awesome for me to hear. I’ve put on a whopping 200 miles in 5 weeks, but do drive to Montana a couple times a year. That has had me freaked out a bit about going EV. My work even has fast chargers, so one of the days I go into the office I could charge and probably be good for a month. I really want an EV6…
[удалено]
I would check on the charging speeds versus battery size, because I know the Ford Lightning doesn't have a great charge speed, especially relative to battery size. (It's almost double the size of our battery and a little more than half of our typical max charging speed.) We've seen enough on the road, and they often take a long time to charge. Though I think some of them, that's because they aren't using the preconditioning feature. Our car has a 77.4 kWh battery, and has a max charge speed of 700kW (though precious few chargers support that). Typically we'll see 230-240 kW on a fast charger when we first plug in (the charging curve slopes downward as the battery charge level rises). It looks like the Mach E maxes out at 150 kW, which is significantly slower, and will make for a longer charge time than we see. It seems that it does at least have preconditioning (added in an update at some point), which means that if you take advantage of that feature to warm the battery up to an optimal charging temperature (~70°F), you get the max charge speed right out the gate. I wouldn't buy any EV without battery preconditioning, and I would make absolutely certain I have it enabled for long trips. (Some cars require that you use the built-in navigation to activate preconditioning. Some just have a button.) Before we got the preconditioning update in our Ioniq 5, we saw *significantly* longer charge times in cold weather than we do now.
[удалено]
I've not seen the preconditioning kick in over about 55-60°F, but if you even see temperatures below 50°, it might be worth enabling. We forgot on one of our stops on the last big trip, and we were only getting like 130kW instead of 230kW when we first plugged in. Added a few minutes to the charge. I think it was something like 48° out. But, yeah, the times it ***really*** matters are when it's below freezing. On the one trip we took before getting the update on our car to enable it, we'd see ~30kW on plug-in, and that slowly ramped up as the battery heated up. That was when it was something like 12°F out, so *really* cold. Though the car does keep the battery at a minimum operating temperature when you're driving.
It really depends on where you live and where your route takes you. There are most definitely areas with no chargers available, and it has prevented me from taking my EV on many trips over the years. Basically anywhere north of me has very limited DCFC choices unless you go on very specific routes towards major cities.
It definitely does depend, but we end up in some fairly rural areas, and none of our routes have prevented us doing what we wanted to do (or really caused us any significant inconvenience). We do always check ahead, but there's not been anywhere we wanted to go that we couldn't. Not yet, at least. And the charging situation is only getting better. If we really needed to, our purchase actually included free ICE car rentals from Hyundai should we need them, and I think we're still in that period, but even with all the outdoorsy stuff we do, we've not needed to take them up on it. I'm certain there are people for whom they wouldn't be a good option yet, but I think a lot more people would be perfectly happy with them than think they would.
This is what I thought before I got an EV now I definitely will be getting a full EV when we replace our second vehicle.
Most people can. You just have to drive around.
In one direction
One direction and on the same road.
And still not see a gas station, let alone charging station
Great how often do you do that? The point is most journeys are short. The USA averages 37 miles a day and the UK 20. A 200+ mile range covers the vast majority of journeys from home.
I could drive for years doing a 17,000km loop of my country over and over, whats the point you are trying to make?
But how often are you actually doing that?
I do it once a month. Trying living in a rural area and needing things. The place only has to be half the distance because you know, you gotta get home.
I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that there's more than one fast charger along your route. We regularly road trip in our EV, an Ioniq 5, and while there are some areas where it is sparse, we've had no trouble planning routes and finding charging, including our trip to Yellowstone this past fall, our trip down into rural southern Texas for the eclipse last week, and regular road trips from near Denver, Colorado to rural Pennsylvania. We generally stop every 2-3 hours to charge, about the time we'd want to get out to stretch our legs and get a bathroom break anyway. And at least half the time, by the time we're done doing our business, the car is done charging. Most of our charging stops are just 10-15 minutes.
People have used EVs in rural areas for many years. AGAIN batteries are improving along with the distance you can go between charges. Biden's infrastructure bill is funding an initiative to have charging stations no more than 50 miles apart. Between faster charge times and increased capacity for batteries this is just simply not an issue.
I do that about once a month, though that's round trip.
If you have a home that’s reasonable. Some of our largest cities don’t have garaged parking, which makes EV adoption more problematic for those areas (though you could easily argue that most them really done need a car except when they leave the city).
Yes, an EV only really makes sense if you can charge at home, at least with current technology. One in three homes here have no driveway so that rules out a lot of people
People insist you need to charge at home but forget that you often spend a significant amount of time elsewhere. All those places can easily have chargers. Grocery shopping? Walmart is installing chargers in their parking lots. Eating out with friends? The shopping center garage is installing chargers. Getting lost in IKEA? Chargers in the parking lot. Instead of taking a few minutes out of your way to stop and refuel, you just do your normal thing and plug in while you’re doing it.
My job has a dozen chargers in the lot and I live in a highly EV adapted city and the issue with your theory is most of the time that parking is full. People aren't coming out halfway through their IKEA run or their workday to move their now fully-charged car. I live in an apartment building with like 40 teslas and *one* charging station (and no normal outlets to charge off of). My next car is going to be a PHEV just because I don't want to wait an hour when the only charging station on my route has a 3 car line or I can't snag a charging spot at IKEA or work. A lot of the EV drivers at work I've talked to share the same sentiment.
The more I talk to regular people out and about regarding my electric car, the more I'm coming to realize that a lot of Americans believe that you can't charge an EV at home without installing some major hardware. The most common question that I have gotten from neighbors is "well how do you plan to charge it?" There's weird amounts of pushback when I explain that I literally just plug my EV into the wall. The idea of topping my EV off overnight seems to sit with even less people than that. It's like there's a set belief that the only possible way to refuel any type of vehicle is to physically go somewhere outside your home and use some other machine.
When I built my new house, I got an extra 220 installed in the garage to future proof any charging needs
I don't have an EV myself, but my friend who has one only charges at home because each public charger requires a different fucking account/app you have to sign up for.
The ones here are mostly card/contactless. Tesla superchargers are obviously the easiest to use but I've just checked the app and I've only used them four times in 4.5 years.
I really doubt that’s the sole reason he doesn’t use public chargers. It’s probably more because he doesn’t need to because he’s not driving 250 miles at a time. Though yes, it’s annoying to need an app for every different charger operator.
We're Americans, and ***outside of long road trips***, we've only used fast chargers a handful of times. Twice when a friend was visiting and we were driving up into Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) each day (we still just have a level 1 charger — 120V at 12A, or 1.4kW — at home). Twice while we were moving and driving back and forth across town all day. And I think just one other time when we were just staying local (and that one we were being overly cautious). Other than that, even with the really slow charger at home, we've been fine. And that's including regular hiking trips up into RMNP. Our most common destination is about a 100 mile round trip with an elevation gain of around a mile. If we do that on a Saturday, we're back to our full charge by Monday morning. We've also driven the 3000 miles (round trip) from Colorado to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving the past two years. Plenty of public charging in there, but most stops at fast chargers are only 10-15 minutes. We just got home a week ago from a 1900 mile round trip down to extremely rural south Texas to see the eclipse. We also took it up to Yellowstone National Park last fall in October, and we did fine charging even in the park (most areas with visitor accommodations have a couple L2 chargers). We even skipped charging one day, because the low speed limits in national parks are super easy on the battery. In short: people are way too anxious about charging.
People can't wrap their heads around the fact that charging and using gas is not a 1:1 ratio.
A lot of people seem to just not be able to wrap their head around charging at home, topping off overnight, etc. Ev charging has to literally be identical to refilling a car with gas and their brain will not accept anything else.
The other thing is chargers can be more easily added to any given place than gas pumps, and it can be used as a draw to get business. Plus they don't need an attendant. Strip malls, restaurants, etc can have chargers that people can use while they'd otherwise just be parked. Plus in remote areas it's a lot easier run power to a charger than to build an entire gas station. Not saying it's the perfect solution but I feel like it's one of those things where it will manifest itself in ways we haven't even considered yet because it's a totally different paradigm than gasoline infrastructure.
EVs only get maybe half the range that a gas powered vehicle get per tank so it's still an even comparison. If an EV could get 500 miles per charge like it's gas counterpart then you'd have a fair argument. An EV will still need to stop and fill up halfway through a 500 mile trip after filling up at home while a gas powered vehicle can do the entire trip in one shot then spend 5 minute filling up with gas to make the trip back home.
Yeah but you’re probably not going to drive 500 miles. Stop for 5 minutes, then drive 500 more miles.
Nor is that healthy. Being forced to stop and take a break for more than a few minutes will help people be more alert and focused on driving safely.
As EVs grow in popularity, I see this as one of the big unspoken benefits and I wouldn't be shocked to see a significant drop in road deaths as a result.
I would be interested to see the density of charging stations per region. You may be able to get away with all electric in densely populated areas, but probably not most rural areas.
https://www.plugshare.com/ The site relies on EV drivers to keep it updated. The DOE also keeps a map that should be up to date. https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC
Our Kia EV6 shows where upcoming chargers are along the route and even how many are available vs. in use. My wife drives it six hours every couple of months to see her dad and has never had charging issues. It's ghostly quiet and sports car quick. In sport mode, it's fast enough to outrun my old corvette (in a straight line). Edit - We live in the countryside, have solar panels, and installed a level-2 charger in our garage. Other than long road trips, we rarely use the fast chargers. As in cell phones, car batteries apparently last longer if you don't charge to 100 percent every time. From her cell phone, my wife tells the car to charge to 80 percent when at home and 100 percent when on the road (to maximize her range). The car also sends a message announcing when it's charged.
Thats where I want to be in the next years, love hearing that!
This ignores that EV owners usually charge at home. In 8000 miles on my current car, I've charged at a charger 3 times, for about 15 minutes each time. Compared to my ICE vehicle that needed gas every 300 miles.
> This ignores that EV owners usually charge at home. In 8000 miles on my current car, I've charged at a charger 3 times, for about 15 minutes each time. Compared to my ICE vehicle that needed gas every 300 miles. As a home owner, that describes me, but if we truly want to encourage EV adoption then we can't forget that at least 45 million US residents are renters, and they don't have nearly as good of access to overnight home charging. https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/quick-facts-figures/quick-facts-resident-demographics/
This exactly! A lot of folks aren’t EV owners because they have no access to charging infrastructure.
And even if we CURRENTLY have access to charging at home, there is no guarantee that we won't be priced out come next lease and need to move somewhere without it...
Even a lot of homeowners don't have off-street parking where they can charge.
Illinois now requires that all new apartments come “charger ready” at *every* parking space.
Let's not forget the avg time to fill up or charge up. It's silly to compare in numbers.
Except most ev owners don't use fast ev chargers often. I drove almost 100,000 miles on my ev without using a fast charger. And I used public chargers less than 10 times m
I can pump gas in like 4 minutes. The fast chargers are quite fast for what they are, but the rotation of gas vehicles in and out of the pumps is much faster.
EV chargers require more time, but most drivers charge at home for 95% of miles.
If you mean 15min sure it's more time.
The writer apparently has never been to a Buc ee’s which usually has about 100 pumps per store
Of course. Imagine if it was normal for people to have gas pumps at home?
Best viewed as a snapshot rather than comparison.
read the article, not even sure what this means. what is "one charging station"? is that one cord? so a gas station with 36 pumps is one gas station and one parking lot with space for 36 EVs to charge at once is 36 charging station? do the chargers that people install in their own homes count? i mean sure those are good but they only benefit the owners.
Yeah, they’re comparing one gas station to one fast charger station. DOE defines a charging station as a site with one or more EV charging ports, with “ports” being the individual charging point that connects to one car. They also have a statistic on total “ports” available, which probably gives a better idea of possible capacity. Also, they’re not including chargers in private homes. I don’t think there are very many level 3 residential chargers anyway, lol. You’d need some serious infrastructure investment for anything beyond level 2 in a house.
>Also, they’re not including chargers in private homes. I don’t think there are very many level 3 residential chargers anyway, lol. You’d need some serious infrastructure investment for anything beyond level 2 in a house. In all fairness, level 1 is plenty for most people at home, if just a bit more inconvenient. Level 2 is a big QoL improvement especially if you have an abnormally long commute or more than 1 electric vehicle. Level 3 at home is an insane amount of juice to run through an house and entirely unnecessary so I would never expect anybody to have that. But yeah I get that wasn't your point. They definitely aren't counting the home charging at all.
Yeah, level 1 charging is doable for most people who drive less than ~50 miles/day. You just have to plug in every night, which is annoying.
The average commute distance is 42 miles a day. https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us-map Better hope you don't have any errands to run or anything that comes up.
Although on a sub zero night it barely keeps up with keeping the battery warm.
And they’re all located at Walmart
in california
and are broken
and the app says they're fine
And there’s a whole crew of people/accounts on r/electricvehicles who will tell you you’re a oil/gas/tesla shill for suggesting Electrify America has some problems. I haven’t done an EA road trip in about 1.5 years and have no desire to punish myself any further. Tens of thousands of miles was enough.
And you can't even log in to the app.
Yep, none of the Walmarts near me have EV charging.
Where are you? The most likely place you'll find one in Montana IS a walmart.
If you can charge at home or at the office, you are in great shape for “around town” driving. I recently got an EV when renting a car out of state. And thought it would be straightforward to find a charger somewhere near a restaurant to charge while I’m eating, or maybe somewhere close to the hotel and just leave it overnight to charge. It wasn’t that easy. Virtually all of the chargers I found were level 2 - 6-8kW. Once I downloaded the app and created an account, I found they were priced by the hour, with it being just a few bucks an hour for the first 2-4 hours and then jumping to $15-$20 an hour beyond that. My car (Hyundai Ionic5) was telling me a full charge would take 8.5 hours! Meals didn’t give me enough time to charge and overnight was going to be to be way too expensive!!! After a few stressed out days with quite a bit of driving, I was grabbing a charge when I could (had to set up 3 different charging accounts, sigh), I was really angry and frustrated at this seemingly impossible situation. I finally found a level 3 charger that charged at 134kW, but it took a ton of searching to do so. That unit charged my car from 50% to full in under a half hour! The annoying thing is that once charged, you start getting billed by the minute and that wasn’t clearly explained when I plugged in, so I had to run back to the car when I got the text that charging was complete. There simply aren’t enough level 3 chargers around in order to make this easy! All and all, I found the experience very annoying with hit or miss charging capabilities over a large metropolitan area. If I had home or office that I could simply charge at conveniently, it would be fine, but if you don’t have that - or are traveling - an EV seems like a huge hassle!!! Chargers in public aren’t enough - there need to be level 3 chargers everywhere.
And they’re all within 320 miles of eachother.
If I had a gas station, I would add EV charging. Makes sense. You can sell the customers snacks and the like while they wait. Besides, most gas stations make their money from the snacks anyways.
Compare ***working*** fast charging stations to gas pumps. Is that even 1 for every 1,000? Doubt it.
My experience with Tesla chargers is amazing. My experience with non-Tesla chargers is AWFUL. They are always broken? Whoever makes these chargers doesn't want people to actually use them.
A ton of them were the result of the Volkswagen dieselgate settlement. I think it's Electrify America that's essentially installed by them, but no firm commitment to keep them running.
EA was formed as part of the punishment the feds handed down to VW over diesel gate. Think about it. Why would EA be any good if VW is forced to do it?
They honestly should create an incentive for gas companies building new gas station to include a couple of charging stations on the property. Idk it makes more sense if we truly want to transition to alternate fuels for transportation: gas, electricity, hydrogen, etc.
Nah, the companies building chargers should be sit-down restaurants and coffee shops. Give people a place to go while it's charging. I've noticed people going inside restaurants and coffee shops during charging, but they tend to sit in the vehicle at shopping centers and stores. IHOP and Denny's would make a killing, especially being open 24/7.
The problem with fast chargers at a sit-down restaurant is a GOOD fast charger only takes 15-20 minutes to top up the car so it's ready to continue a road trip, and maybe 35-40 minutes to get to 90% or better, so it's tough to get in, get a table, order, get your food, eat, pay and get back to your car before it's finished. It'd be perfect for a slower (and presumably cheaper to deploy) 20-30 position 40-50kw DC charger that would be expected to take a full hour or more for a charge plus 8-10 positions of the full power 250-350kw ones for people in a hurry. I think Tesla was on to something with their older, slow (45kw?) 'urban' chargers where you'd expect to park, plug in and go shopping for an hour or more. I've actually charged for 20 minutes then moved the car and gone to eat afterward so I don’t have to worry about moving it just as the waiter delivers my food. A coffee shop would be perfect though - enough time to get in, decrypt the menu of 500 permutations of inscrutably named caffeinated refreshments and select a 1200 calorie muffin, maybe sit down to get a start enjoying them and take them with you when the car is ready.
To be fair, I'm way more likely to spend at least 20 minutes at a restaurant than a gas station. Besides, the charger is actually in the EV, the station is just a fancy plug that talks to the battery pack. And if the stations are put next to restaurants, it's fair that the people using them are also paying customers, so it's less important that people be constantly moving their cars around to make room.
If they made every parking space in the lot a charger and parking was free-for-all, it wouldn't make any difference at all.
That might help until charging gets faster, but the really competition is when 10-80% charging times are down to 10 mins or less. Then you'll want gas station type charging stations and see much higher EV adaption.
Physics prevents charging that quickly. We can't deliver enough power to the charger, nor can that much power be passed to the vehicle by a reasonably sized cable. EVs will always have relatively long charging times.
The 250kW cable is thinner than the 150kW cable. The tech has kept up. There are even higher voltage charging stations out there capable of moving enough electrons for a 0-100% charge in 10-15 minutes, but batteries haven't reached a point where they can do that just yet.
There's no way to get enough current to the chargers to meet theoretical demand. You guys are looking at the wrong side of the charging infrastructure. more EVs = higher demand = more necessary current = slower charging times There's no way to overcome this problem currently. However fast you can theoretically charge cars is irrelevant if there's no power to charge the cars. After one trucking company showed a requirement for a dedicated power station to charge 13 short haul trucks on a daily basis, people should understand the ridiculousness of EVs and their insane demands going forward. We're a long, long way off from an EV in every garage.
Other countries have managed to do it. Surely the US isn't that far behind the curve. It isn't a matter of a shortage of power, but distributing it at the right time and place. Time of Use pricing has solved that in many places, since EV drivers can schedule the car to charge in the middle of the night when there's surplus power.
Yeah that's not true at all lol. We're already getting charging times down into the teens and cables are getting more efficient in general. Battery composition and charging structures have already improved dramatically in the last 15 years, and will continue to do so as we discover new manufacturing methods.
In Canada we have a burger joint and convenience store at some of the fast charging stations.
I assume your talking about the ONRoutes. This isn't normal for most of the country.
Isn't there a drive in movie theatre coming to LA for this reason? Also I could see stuff like a sonic style restaurant making a comeback
Sonic and A&W should bring back drive-ins with chargers. Discounted EV charging with a minimum purchase.
That’s what happens in Germany. Some even provide free charging to get the clients to buy something else there. But I think they should upgrade their interior first.
theyd just get vandalized by mike while waiting for his diesel RAM truck with 40 gallon tank to fill up
My nearest petrol station has four electric chargers.
They won’t see this opportunity. The same way Blockbuster didn’t see streaming.
Stupid question for someone that doesn’t have an EV. How much is it to charge up? Is it comparable to price per gallon or something?
For my Lightning with a 130 kW-h battery, charging it 0-100% at home would be $13 for 320 miles per the EPA. DC fast charging it varies by state. Here in Wisconsin Electrify America is priced per minute (for now), so the same battery would be roughly $20. Other states DC fast chargers are priced per kW-h, averaging around 48 cents. The same "tank" would cost me $62. It is more expensive than the gasoline equivalent F150 because at 20 mpg, 320 miles would be $56 (assuming $3.50 a gallon). The savings come from charging at home for day-to-day use.
Once did some work for an oil company… the important concept is “throughput,” or the number of vehicles you can fill up in one hour. Gas stations not only have this heavy numerical advantage in sheer number of facilities but also much higher throughput per facility, given how slowly an EV charges. For EACH reason, EVs are disadvantaged. Then when you fscor both data points into account, the EV market has a very long way to go…
This is changing though. With an EV, anywhere with electricity is a potential gas station. Gassing up is always a discrete step in a trip but charging an EV can be a step combined with the destination or purpose. Many parking garages are adding chargers so you can charge while you work or shop. If you’re going on a long trip, you can stop, stretch your legs, grab a bite to eat, all while your car is charging, then hit the road more refreshed.
Get to a hotel, charger in the lot. If not? Don’t book there. We’re definitely in that phase and it’s a good thing.
The difference is you don't fill your car with gas at home, work, while shopping, or the myriad of other places chargers can be placed that gas cannot. The EV charging network is also not complete. This is only a step in the direction towards a final goal of ubiquitous charging.
Throughput is more important when the task can’t be achieved passively.
Not even sure if I believe it to be honest.
How many *functional* EV fast chargers compared to gas station?
More than yesterday.
Was about to mention this. Drove from LA to Vegas back in November, and out of all the *working* DC fast chargers, none of them along the way exceeded 20 kwh - DC fast should be able to reach 50 kwh.
And one fast ev charging station that is currently functioning for every 150 gas stations
and 4 out of 10 of those fast charge stations is broken. I see people that dont even own an EV are downvoting. Electrify America has a huge amount of fast charge stations that just do not work or charge at a trickle charge rate. It's a known fact pull your heads out of the sand and demand federal regulations that force them to repair them. Last year, researchers visited every public fast charger in the San Francisco Bay Area and found that almost 23 percent of them had “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors.” And in a survey of EV drivers, the auto consultancy J.D. Power found the public charging network “plagued with non-functioning stations.” One in five sessions failed to deliver a charge. Almost three-quarters of those failures involved a station that malfunctioned or was offline. and it gets worse when you get out away from big cities. The midwest has a huge number of dead or broken chargers.
One can fill a car with a tank of gas in 5 minutes or less. Let's say that all the public EV chargers were DC Fast chargers and people only charged to 200 mile range. That's 15 minutes of time minimum. We'd need 3 times the number or EV charging stations than gas pumps. Once there are 3 EV stations for every 1 pump or they can figure out how to fast charge to 200 miles an EV in under 5 minutes to get to 1:1, we have a long way to go.
I can charge my EV at my house with far less than 5 minutes of effort. You don't have to match gas stations in throughput. Most EV charging is done at home. Effectively *zero* gas pumping is done at home.
Now, go on a trip 500 miles on a single house charge.
Now, go on ten 50 mile trips without stopping at a gas station. Congrats - you learned that different technologies have different uses. Also for what it's worth, a 500 mile trip in my EV will take exactly one charging stop. In my gas car (that's right, I own both) it would also take one stop. It would be ~5 minutes for a gas fill up, and it's ~20 minutes for the EV charge. That's a 15 minute difference in a 8-9 hour trip. It's also about half the price. Are you sure that proved the point you were hoping to make?
Ok? But obviously at any given time it’s a small percentage of EV owners doing that. This is about how many chargers would be needed to replace gas stations
Not 3x, more like 10x to 20x. Gas pumps can deliver 10 gal/min, which for an average efficiency of 25mpg, is equivalent to delivering 250 miles of range per minute. Even a 250kW Tesla fast charger will only deliver 17 miles per minute maximum. That's 15 times slower! and you can't even sustain it for the whole capacity of the battery, it slows down significantly after reach ~50% SoC. Even taking in account the time spent opening the gas tank and ideal EV charging conditions, you still need at least 10 EV fast charges to be equivalent to a single gas pump!
That’s only if you treat pumping gas and recharging as equivalent activities. Generally, you stand next to your car for a couple of minutes while it refills and then you go on your way. However, in increasingly more places, you plug your car in when you get there and then walk away and go about your business.
I was giving best case scenario of all charging stations being able to provide the fastest DC charging method which can give 200 miles range in 5 minutes. Using today's numbers, however, it would require like what you said, 10x to 20x.
There might be one EV "station" for every 15 gas stations, but there's no way that there is 1 EV charger for every 15 gas pumps. I can tell you right now within a 5 mi radius of my house, there's 3 EV chargers *total* and there's easily a dozen gas stations in that same radius, and the smallest one has 8 pumps.
Difference is most people have electricity at home, but don’t have a gas pump at home.
anti EV people dont think of that.
Ah yes, tell that to the 30% of Americans who rent... Have yet to see an apartment complex with charging stations at it. Would love to see it though. If it became standard to have charging stations in complexes, and they were reasonably priced (along with idle fees to keep them available) I'd more strongly consider an EV. At the moment, public charging is not only a hassle, but not even cheaper than gas...
It's all about WHERE you live though. I can tell you within a 5 mi from MY house there's 20 tesla superchargers and 11 slow chargers all in different stations.
Oh I agree 100%. I live in the ass end of nowhere, like a large portion of rural America.
Therefore, much more ground to cover in that sector of infrastructure.
Until the meth-heads steal the cables. Again.
If the average gas station has 8 pumps and a pump on average is occupied twice as long as a charging station... The usa has 1 fast EV station for every 15 gas stations but 1/200 the equivalent refueling capacity
Sure doesn’t seem like it. Wait— do we mean _working_ fast chargers?????
What makes this trickier is the fact that home charging is more common (as opposed to you know filling up the tank at your house?!) and that the gas vs electric car market is still very saturated with gas
*laughs in rural Mainer*
Now if only more than 25% of them were working... It's so frustrating that an app like plugshare has to exist.
Now compare EV chargers vs actual fuel bowsers/pumps
How many of them are working though. The EVgo ones in my town have all been broken for a year then some.
We have an entire bank of them in our Meijer parking lot. There's like 10 of them all in a row and they're always lit and ready to go.
We can probably think Tesla for that, the rest is made up by the smaller competitors.
I live in a suburb in CA. The places I can charge are pretty much unlimited. There’s some even at our local parks and fast food places. One of the “smarter” places to start buildings these would be at the movie theaters, go in and watch a movie and charge your car at the same time.
I’ve found two Community Centers with free fast charging. It works as an incentive for me to workout a little longer so the car can be fully charged on someone else’s dime.
Still not enough to get me to commit to driving an electric car.
How many are available for all the people who park on streets? Not everyone is going to have a garage. Until we can address the needs of street parkers, I don't see EV being viable. No one wants to sit in a parking lot for half an hour at least once a week. For those with a significant commute, they definitely don't want to do that every day.
Can’t compare until it takes 3 minutes to charge to full.
When EVs can recharge in under ten minutes and have the same drive range as an ICE under all weather conditions and have features like AWD I'll consider one. Until then I like my Subaru.
Luckily the AWD part is already here. But, I feel you on the rest. The charging can be a hassle, but I find that by the time I use the restroom and stretch my legs it's usually close to done charging. The weather thing is a huge sticking point. In cold weather range does drop drastically. The hardcore fans will tell you "that happens in ICE cars too", but the reality is that it's much more impactful in an EV. All that said though they are super fun vehicles and road trips are definitely possible with a little extra planning.
What’s the concentration though
"fast"
I want to know how many people have gas stations at home, to compare to the home EV charging.
Each gas station has multiple pumps that complete fueling in 10 min or less.
A fast EV charging station might take an hour to service a single EV. A gas STATION can service many more. Let's pretend there are 8 pumps per station, and each pump can service a car in 5 minutes. That would be 40 cars per hour. So that is a capacity of 1 EV service per 600 GV (gas vehicle) service. Roughly. Also, fast charging is terrible for batteries, and reduces the lifespan significantly.
WI here. I don't know anyone with an electric only car.
So 1 per square mile? /s
And how many of them are in working condition?
In my area, there is 2 charging stations (not fast charging) (only one works) to 50+ gas stations.
Okay... but where? California? We have jack in the North East it seems.
Oh yeah? Where’d they hide them?
Is that high or low?
So anyways.
I work at a Toyota dealership, and it several instructors 3+ days of driving to get new EV’s from Chicago to Minneapolis.
If only I could get my car upgraded to handle fast DC charging. Otherwise I'm stuck at level 2.
Laughs in high octane turbo noises *vrrrrdr ksshhhh*
Not evenly distributed, and not comparing pumps to handles numbers.
What percentage of them are functioning at the same time, on average.
Still not buying one. If it was just a rechargeable engine, fine, but I’m not interested in having a car with an operating system that belongs to someone else. I want the stuff I buy to be mine, and I’m not switching to this.
That would be great if there were many at airport long-term parking.
So one EV charging station can do one car around 150 miles an hour (if lucky) but one gas station may have 8-10 pumps that can put 8-20 gallons (100 miles or more) per minute.
I live in Louisville, and there are only three stations of the whole city!
K now do the Midwest
Yeah, but what is the geographical repartition?
How many of these charging stations are functional on an average at any given point in time?
.... And each station has 8 pumps on average that can all fill a tank within 5 minutes at most even for huge vehicles.. While charging stations take up to 8 hours... If we're being really generous to EV and say it takes 4 hours to charge and 5 minutes to fill a car tank, if you do the math here one gas pump nearly 50x more efficient than a charging station for fueling cars.. Just one pump too. Not that I like it but this is a silly comparison lol
A bowser ratio would be better
We did it! 🎉 /s